Is Saudi Arabia’s takeover of EA another big-brain play or a sign of desperation? Can a more generous Black Ops 7 battle pass convince players to keep playing? What does James Cameron really think about Netflix? It’s another edition of Morning Checkpoint, our daily roundup of gaming news and culture.
As we skid into the long holiday weekend, I’m trying to decide exactly how many Black Friday discounted game controllers I should buy to replace the ones my kids keep breaking. Or maybe I should just stop paying my electricity bill and force them all to take up knitting instead.
Saudi Arabia is having an Embracer moment
The country’s Public Investment Fund has made a bunch of bad bets, according to The New York Times (via Game Developer). It reports that the sovereign wealth fund is running low on cash for new investments. You might remember one of them being a concept for a futuristic city in the desert in the shape of one long line.
This makes the fund’s massive bid to take EA private seem somewhat more desperate and precarious, given that much of it will be debt-financed at high interest rates. Embracer itself once looked to the PIF to save it, rapidly unraveling once a multi-billion dollar deal failed to materialize. It never recovered. We’ll see how long Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman can continue flooding the zone with oil money to whitewash the country’s human rights record.
Notably, the EA Saudi deal was reportedly facilitated by Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law. MBS recently visited the White House in exchange for fighter jets, advanced AI chips, and god knows what else. Trump brushed off MBS’s alleged role in having a Washington Post journalist murdered a few years back as “things happen” and claimed his family has done “little” business with the Kingdom. I guess the largest leveraged buyout of an American firm by a foreign entity is just table stakes these days.
The Black Ops 7 battle pass will be more generous than the Black Ops 6 one
You’ll still have to battle FOMO, but unlocks will come more easily. “The team has taken learnings from Black Ops 6’s Battle Pass completion times and made tuning adjustments for a more satisfying journey,” the devs wrote in a new blog post. “The result: each season’s Battle Pass in Black Ops 7 will be more rewarding for your time spent in-game, no matter where you’re playing across all parts of the game.”
Initial pages will be shorter, and players can earn Battle Pass Tokens from Daily Challenges including in the co-op campaign, in case you’re a glutton for punishment.
Palmer Luckey’s N64 clone is getting revealed soon
The ModRetro M64 hardware is getting a full reveal on Black Friday – features, colors, our incredible new controller, cutting-edge @AMD hardware, etc.
Much has changed since we launched early bird pricing at $199 earlier this year, things like inflation, component shortages,… pic.twitter.com/T8MLilyweh
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) November 25, 2025
The ModRetro M64 is the arms dealer’s latest side project: an FPGA machine that plays old N64 cartridges on modern displays. Despite things like “inflation, component shortages, tariffs, and more,” the price will remain $200, which is 20 percent less than the recently launched Analogue 3D. The devil will be in the details, however. Luckey says all will be revealed on Black Friday, though a holiday 2025 release seems like a long-shot at this point.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment gets a free update this week
The November 27 patch will add more weapons, enemies, and other small features, like some fresh team-up attacks for the musou fighter’s characters.
Helldivers 2 is getting jungle armor and giant chainsaws
The Python Commandos Warbond will go live for players on December 2. In addition to the new Contra-style kits, players will get the CQC-9 Defoliation Tool which looks like a long buzz-saw that will slice through enemies and trees alike.
Big Jim hates Netflix
The Avatar 3 director and box office giant James Cameron had some harsh words for the streamer’s Oscar strategy in a recent interview. “We’ll put the movie out for a week, we’ll put it out for 10 days; we’ll qualify for Academy Awards consideration,” he said, critiquing the company’s free-loading strategy. “See, I think that’s fundamentally rotten at the core. The Academy Awards, to me, mean nothing if they don’t mean theatrical.”
Basically, he’s accusing Netflix of trying to draft off of the prestige of awards nominations without actually investing in theaters, all while its platform is directly undercutting the broader movie-going experience. Personally, I think Cameron could do a lot more to help theaters by releasing good movies instead of more Avatar sequels, but his underlying logic is unimpeachable.
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